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China has now 210 million users according to a press release from the China Internet Network Information Centre (The CNNIC is a government agency).

That’s a lot, considering that half a year ago there were only 165 million users and a year ago 137 million. In one year the number of users has gone up with 73 million users.

It definitely has something to do with the fact that in their previous report the CNNIC changed their definition of an internet user from “Chinese citizens aged 6 and above who averagely use the Internet at least one hour per week” to “Chinese citizens aged 6 and above who used the Internet in the last half year” which I wrote about before.

Still, it’s an impressive number and it’s no surprise that the second sentence of the press release starts with,

The total number of Internet users in China reached 210 million people, China’s netizens has only a difference of 5 million people with the United States, ranked second in the world, CNNIC expects that in early 2008 China will become the country with the largest population of internet users.(Translation is Google’s and slightly polished.)

Another interesting statistic is the number of .cn domains reaching 11.93 million. That’s 190.4% more than the year before. The catch here is that the CNNIC lowered last year the price of .cn names to 1 Rmb. They have extended the program till the end of December 2008 and I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep on extending this program.

The number of Internet users and domains seems to become part of geo politics.

If your Mandarin is up-to-date you can download the full report here (pdf alert).